Secrets To Writing 1000-Words Article In 2 Hours: Including Tips From Stephen King
Stephen King, the famous novelist whose novels have been adapted into movies like ‘Shawshank Redemption’, writes almost 3 novels in every 6 months. We at ‘A Numb Mind‘ bring to you the writing tips Stephen King incorporates to write faster. In this article, we have also incorporated writing tips from several successful bloggers, copywriters, and journalists along with the strategy that works for us.
So, you are on your track to learn the secret of writing a 1000 words article in less than 2 hours.
1. Set A 3-Phase Timer
You should set a timer for three phases of your writing:
- Brainstorming
- First Draft
- Post-Process.
A brainstorming session should not take more than 5 minutes. Set the timer for it and jot down the points. We will talk about some brainstorming hacks later in this article.
During the second phase of drafting, write what you know about a topic. You can add facts, statistics, and quotes later to glam the skeleton.
Don’t edit while you write. Editing is a post-process thing and there are several specialized software to help you out. I will talk about it below.
2. Brainstorming In Bullet Points
A writing tip for a beginner into the blogging world is — ‘minimize your ideation time’.
Ideation often consumes a lot of time. As the successful blogger Marie Forleo says, you need to draw a quick outline or structure for your article and stick to it.
If you keep fluctuating regarding your stand on a topic, you would waste time overthinking.
Therefore, jot down your ideas quickly as bullet points and stick to one viewpoint.
3. Quickly Put Yourself Into Shoes of Others
Although bloggers and editors often have the freedom to write on subjects of interest, copywriters hardly have a choice. Therefore, you need to put yourself into the shoes of the potential customers or target audience to craft a resourceful article.
For example, if you have been assigned to write an article on the ‘Downsides of Being an Empathetic Leader’ targeting the youths in colleges, you just have to make yourself believe for the next few minutes that empathy is not a good virtue although you may personally think contrary to it.
If you are writing an article on “How Yelp Helps Local Business?”, you believe that the majority of the restaurant-goers in the USA refer to Yelp before venturing out.
4. Create A List Of Resourceful Websites For Trends and Stats
Creative copywriting requires you to create brand awareness. So, you need to be aware of the market trends, market positioning of a product, consumer psychology, and some product-related statistics.
You don’t have to surf the internet frantically for ideas and quote unreliable statistics from less authoritative websites. What you should do is to refer to a few authoritative websites in your genre for reliable facts and latest trend on a topic.
For example, to write business articles related to Intenet Marketing, you can refer to Entrepreneur, Forbes, Inc, Fortune, and The Economist. If you are writing for a technology firm, you can look for ideas on WIRED, TechCrunch, and Gizmodo.
5. Avoid adverbs, long paragraphs and stop being a Grammar nazi
Stephen King emphasizes in his memoir, “the adverb is not your friend.”
“Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes,”
Stephen King
The writing tips Stephen King gave in an interview is quite relevant today. Today, the objective of many articles isn’t about grammatical correctness or using fancy words. Let Grammarly do its job.
All you need to do is make the reader welcome to the topic and then tell a story. You should pay attention to your paragraphs so that they flow with the turns and rhythms of your story.
Using long paragraphs or long sentences is a big turn-off for your readers. Formulating long and complicated sentences also takes time as a writer and longer to edit. So, just avoid them.
6. Use Speech-to-Text Technology
I believe that I can write faster on a sheet of paper than type on the keyboard. While writing, I can just cross out an idea instead of pressing the back button.
Further, if you develop a shorthand writing notation instead of writing down the whole sentence, you can save time.
Take a look at a sample shorthand notation to help you out.
If you are one of such a writer/blogger, just jot down your article on the paper. Then read it out loud in a speech to text converter. It would save you a lot of time from typing things.
You can use free software like Windows 10 speech recognition, Google Cloud Speech-to-Text or Voice Dictation. Voice Dictation and Google Cloud can be launched online and I found it easy and convenient to use. If you own an Amazon Echo, do productively make use of it.
Conclusion
Writing a 1000 word article in 2 hours is not a myth anymore. Just stick to writing tips Stephen King shared and try fabricating a few articles based on the above Numb Tips. Let us know if they helped you in improving your blogging/writing speed.
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Originally published at www.anumbmind.xyz on May 12, 2019.
